Rooftop Solar: The Next iPod?

I still remember the first MP3 player I touched - it was the size of a fat sandwich and six times as heavy, with clunky rubber molding and a dim, finicky screen. It only held a couple hours of music. Why would anyone want one of these?

And then Apple released the iPod and changed - forever - the way we listen to music.

But the change didn’t happen right away. We resisted. The iPod was slick, and we all wanted one, but it was expensive, only for diehard Apple-heads. It took several years for the iPod to really take off.

Here’s a look at how the price of the iPod - per gigabyte of music it could hold - dropped over time:

Jordan Wirfs-Brock / Inside Energy

The price of an iPod, in terms dollars you paid per unit of storage, dropped sharply after the release of the first model in 2001. Data source: Brian Ford, Newsvine.

Rooftop solar may still seem like a fringe trend, but the rate of rooftop installations (and the growth of net metering customers, who can sell power back to utilities) suggests solar is on its way to being mainstream:

Kelsey Pegler Junior, President of NRG Home Solar, has a clear vision of solar’s rise:

“Today if a new house is built,” Kegler said, “if you put solar on that house, your friends, neighbors, family are going to say, ‘Wow you put solar on that house that’s interesting tell me about it.’”

But Kegler thinks that’s about to change.

“I think three years out, if you build a new house in America and you don’t put solar on that house, that same group of friends, family and neighbors is going to say, ‘What happened, why don’t you have solar on that roof?’” Kegler said.

Of course, Kegler installs solar panels for a living, and has reason to be optimistic. Keep in mind, although solar is growing rapidly, it’s still a tiny part of our electricity infrastructure - only a quarter of a percent of U.S. homes have solar panels on their roofs. And solar panels aren’t, and never will be, iPods: The energy and entertainment industries operate under different economic, political, and social influences.

More In This Series

Inside Energy reporters Dan Boyce and Jordan Wirfs-Brock examine how solar energy - particularly rooftop solar panels - is changing the way electricity is delivered in the U.S. in this multi-part series: In A Blackout, Your Solar Panels May Be Useless; Utilities Push Back On Rooftop Solar; An Edison V. Westinghouse Rematch.

The Hill| The head Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee is calling on seven different university heads to reveal how much of the work of their climate science research is funded by fossil fuel industries.

Inside Energy is a collaborative journalism initiative of partners across the US and supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

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